BOLT and UP previewed at SDCC

Honor Hunter, the lucky bum, is attending the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con. Of course, he’s capturing all the Disney magic he can for his Blue Sky Disney blog. He provides this report from the Disney presentation of BOLT, the next film from Walt Disney Animation Studios, and UP, the next film from Pixar Studios.

First, I was happy to read, BOLT looks to be heads and shoulders above the recent material coming from Burbank.

You could clearly tell from the discussion with the directors that having Lasseter there has given the whole department a great, positive boost for the better. The atmosphere and direction are much sharper and clearer. With his focus, he’s been able to drive the animators and story people to work harder at creating something better. Something we expect from Disney that previous management lost somewhere along the way…

Not everything they showed was finished but a good portion of it was. There was twenty minutes of footage from Bolt and it started off with scenes from the show that he stars on. Really impressive action here. There is a depth to these clips that has been clearly missing from recent Disney flicks.

Next up was UP, where we learned more about the story behind the film.

While it has a lot of emotional range in the clips that were shown, it definitely feels different… in a good way, though. It has a slight bittersweet quality to the scenes which involve an older gentleman named, Carl. Carl owns a house in this area that is supposed to be redeveloped and he’s the lone holdout. He won’t sell. There was a scene that showed some people that were coming to take him to a retirement home. He asks them to wait, goes inside and thousands of balloons sprout out of the chimney sending his house rising into the air and headed…

It’s actually traveling to South America

I don’t understand how people can bad mouth Pixar films without actually haven’t seen them. I mean isn’t a perfect box office record evidence enough to have some trust in the folks from Emeryville. UP sounds like another hit to me, even if it does seem a bit off the beaten path for typical animation. Of course, we don’t expect typical animation from Pixar.

I thought Monsters Inc. looked stupid from the first trailer. It’s my favorite from them to date. I’m always willing to give Pixar a chance and will do so until they have several true flops in a row. I don’t think that’s coming any time soon.